Baron Macaulay's Legacy

Post-colonial nations that accepted new learning did better.

So far in this series, we've been exploring the intersection between
education and culture. Most people get a large chunk of their
culture from the education they receive, both formal and through being
immersed in whatever customs their family follows at home.

It takes a deal of doing to permanently change a culture from
without, but it can be done; Alexander the Great's conquering armies
spreading Greek culture from Greece all the way to India comes to
mind. In the previous article in this
series we discussed the nineteenth-century controversy over
what
language to use in the Indian education system. Should students
be taught in Sanskrit, Arabic, or English?

Baron Macaulay made a
convincing case for English. He noted that Indian students would
pay for the privilege of being taught in English whereas the government
had to pay students to study in either Sanskrit or Arabic - everyone
knew that English was going to be the money language. That is the
same argument that American opponents of bilingual education make to this day.

What Happened?

Following the leadership of Baron Macaulay, the British Raj changed
the
Indian education system to operate in
English. This made all scientific, technical, and cultural
English writings available to any Indians who found entry into one of
the
British schools. Especially bright students were sent to
England's top universities to be educated alongside England's own
elites and returned to occupy
responsible high-level positions in business or politics.
Technically-literate Indian workers helped build
railroads, water plants, and sewer systems without which large cities
become essentially unworkable.

History shows that no nation can
become wealthy without large cities since concentration of numerous
skills
makes innovation easier and productivity higher, but cities are
unhealthy without sophisticated water management technology. With
greater education and modern technical knowledge came other beneficial
cultural changes: the
colonial government ended feud-based wars between Indian states and
put a stop to
widow burning (suttee) in Hindu majority areas.

For nearly two centuries, the technical
civilizing efforts of the British in
India
were respected - Karl Marx, a dedicated Eurocentric, talked about the
liberalizing effect of European colonialism on tribal and feudal
cultures. The difference between civilization and barbarism was
often even more obvious elsewhere than in India: as journalist Helen
Andrews wrote, “When Englishmen first arrived
in
Mashonaland in the 1880s, the civilization they encountered there had
not developed currency, written language, irrigation, beasts of burden,
the plough, or the wheel.”

Despite the obvious ways in which India and other nations
benefited, colonialism is
in bad odor today. It has become so politically incorrect that a
group of
scholars who wanted to discuss the benefits of colonialism had to meet in great secrecy to avoid being shouted out of their Oxford University
venue.

No rational individual ought to attempt to claim that colonialism
and imperialism was
purely good or evil - there is abundant evidence for both the evils of
colonialism and the benefits, though the two are not equally
distributed. In the current "woke" climate, saying that
colonialism was anything other than pure evil is utterly unacceptable
in our modern
academies regardless of any facts.

A paper "The Case for
Colonialism"
by Bruce Gilley, an associate professor of political science at
Portland State University, argued that

"...it's high time to re-evaluate [the] pejorative meaning" of
colonialism, since, by his accounting,
"countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did
better than those that spurned it."

Inside Higher
Edreported that Third World Quarterly
received a petition signed by more than 10,000 academics asking that
the article be withdrawn and that the magazine apologize for
implying that there might have been any positive results from
colonialism. The petition claimed that the paper "lacks empirical
evidence, contains historical inaccuracies and includes spiteful
fallacies. There is also an utter lack of rigor or engaging with
existing scholarship on the issue."

How can academics, supposedly serious scholars dispassionately
evaluating evidence, possibly claim that colonialism was purely
evil and entirely devoid of benefit? Indian nationalists are
understandable and fully human in
wanting to preserve
their traditional Sanskrit and Arabic literature, but they do not
reject the technology and science which were merged into their
educational system by the British.

Although he's criticized as a colonialist cultural imperialist,
Macaulay's efforts had overwhelming economic benefits which enrich
Indians to this very day and which will continue to enrich their
descendants for the foreseeable future. English-speaking
Indians staff call centers and write software for businesses all over
the world - how much of this could be done in Sanskrit?

The
Indian railroad system operates in English as do
most nationwide enterprises. The Indian economy has not expanded
as
rapidly as it might have because the government took control of far
too much of the economy, but before the British left, they had
educated enough Indians that they could operate and
expand the railroads, sewer systems, and electric grid the British
had helped build.

The Arc of History?

Voxadmits that African incomes increased markedly
during the colonial
period starting from the base year 1885, but argues that the spread of
technology and the rising incomes
technology brings would have happened anyway.

Most of Africa spent two generations under colonial rule. This
column
argues that, contrary to some recent commentaries highlighting the
benefits of colonialism, it is this intense experience
that has significantly retarded economic development
across the continent. Relative to any plausible counterfactual,
Africa is poorer today than it would have been had
colonialism not occurred.

History shows that none of this technical or
economic progress was inevitable; in fact,
many other post colonial
nations chose another path that turned out disastrously. Prof
Gilley presents a number of examples such as the Guinea-Bissau
guerrilla war against Portuguese rule, led by Amílcar
Cabral. The war killed 15,000 combatants out of a population
of 600,000 and at least as many civilians, Gilley says, and displaced
another 150,000.

Once "'liberation' was achieved in 1974, a second human tragedy
unfolded, costing at least 10,000 further lives as a direct result of
conflict," he says. "By 1980, rice production had fallen by more than
50 percent to 80,000 tons (from a peak of 182,000 tons under the
Portuguese). ... Cabral's half brother, who became president, unleashed
the secret police on the tiny opposition -- 500 bodies were found in
three mass graves for dissidents in 1981. A tenth of the remaining
population upped stakes for Senegal. The Cabralian one-party state
expanded to 15,000 employees, 10 times as big as the Portuguese
administration at its peak."

Ordinary citizens might be forgiven for asking, "When will the
Portuguese come back?"

The Rhodesian transition from white rule to black rule in Zimbabwe
is another example of colonization that did not work out nearly as well
as in India. Inflation destroyed
the
currency, agricultural output collapsed when experienced farmers were
driven off their farms, and in 2018, CNN
reported that Zimbabwe had declared a state of
emergency because of a cholera outbreak:

Poor waste disposal systems and broken sewers which
may have contaminated water
sources in Harare [the nation's capital] have been blamed for
the disease outbreak, the health minister
said. [emphasis added]

Cholera is an acute diarrheal illness that kills thousands of
people
worldwide each year.

In 2008, more than 4,000 people were killed in one of the worst
cholera
outbreaks to have hit the country, according to the World Health
Organization.

Public finances were in such bad shape that the government launched
a crowdfunding scheme to fix the sewers.
Cholera epidemics are a more visible result of water mismanagement than
the lead found in American children, but it has the same root cause -
mis-governance by technologically illiterate politicians.

What accounts for the difference between the long-term results of
colonialism in India and Zimbabwe? Mainly the passage of
time. The British managed the English-language instruction system
in India from 1835 until Indian independence in 1947 - over a century,
which is 5 or 6 generations.

In contrast, Rhodesia was founded as a personal project by Cecil
Rhodes, a
fabulously wealthy diamond seeker who earned
enough money to fund Rhodes Scholarships, a program which continues to
this day. The Colonial period started when a British-based
government was established in 1923. Prime minister Ian "Good 'ol
Smitty" Smith declared independence in 1965. Under pressure from
the British government, the country was turned over to Robert Mugabe in
1980.

The Indian education system was run by the British for 112
years; the Rhodesian system for 57 years, half as long. That
wasn't long
enough to insert enough technological knowledge into a non-technical
society or to change the culture sufficiently to be able to
maintain modern infrastructure.

It's Not Colonialism or Cultural Imperialism, it's Technology

On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy,
sailed into Tokyo Bay and made the Japanese an offer they couldn't
refuse - trade with us or we'll blow you to smithereens. The
Japanese quickly learned that the European great powers had easily
overwhelmed the
Imperial
Chinese government, a much larger and supposedly more powerful entity
than were the Japanese. The powers-that-were realized that they
had
to focus on basic societal necessities such as modern armaments and the
technology required to support them, to have any chance of
avoiding the same fate.

The Meiji restoration of 1868 marked the
defeat of the faction that wanted Japan to remain isolated, so there
were
no more obstacles to learning from foreign barbarians. The
Japanese learned Western technology so rapidly that they were able to
crush the Imperial Russian Navy, generally considered to be a European
Great Power, during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 a scant
few decades later.

When the decision to concentrate on Western learning was made and
led by their own native rulers, it took the Japanese only 36 years to
go from muscle-powered agriculture to
defeating a European major power if you count from the Meiji
Restoration. Even if you count from Commodore Perry's wake-up
call, that's still only a half-century.

From this quick tour through colonial-era history, we learn that:

Macaulay was correct in asserting that brown and yellow people
could learn
everything the British education system had to offer. Indeed,
Indians have made seminal contributions to mathematics as well as other
areas of intellectual endeavor.

We know from the achievements of Dr. Ben Carson, Gen. Collin
Powell, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Booker T. Washington, Dr.
Ben Carson, and countless
others that black people are also capable of
learning in full equality with anyone else. Indeed, Charles
Richard Drew's experiments with blood
transfusion and storing whole blood saved thousands of lives during WW
II. There is nothing about any particular race that bars them
from participating fully in intellectual advancement.

Injecting
meaningful amounts of technology into a non-technical society takes
time. The Indians had 112 years; 51 years was insufficient
in Rhodesia. The Japanese managed it in 51 years from their
wake-up call because their
rulers were motivated to avoid foreign conquest;
being members of their own cultures may have made them more effective
in ramming changes down the throats of their compatriots than
outsiders would have been. We saw something similar a century
later: once the Chinese abandoned Communism,
they managed their own transition in 30 years.

Education
shortfalls can have drastic, deadly, and
difficult-to-fix consequences such as lead in the pipes and gas
explosions. It's not enough just to build the modern
infrastructure; a high-tech level of culture and education must
continue in force in order to keep the technology operating
properly. There are cities in Africa which have been unable to
maintain the perfectly functional and modern colonial infrastructure
they inherited, and which have therefore regressed, because they did
not put sufficient emphasis on modern education.

Baron Macaulay won his culture war so that the Indian
education system was based on English, to the eternal benefit of the
Indian people themselves long after British rule vanished from the
scene.

Yet ironically, Macaulay did
not actually practice what is today called Macaulayism,
which seeks to replace
indigenous culture with the culture of the
colonizing power. If you visit an Indian city, you'll find that
it's nothing like a city in Europe. Like the Chinese and
Japanese, the
Indians grafted western
technology into their traditional
culture without losing very much of it.

It's true that adopting technical education means that
there's less time to study traditional Japanese, Chinese, or Sanskrit
literature,
but most Asians would agree that their increased
lifespans, comfort, and their ability to repel hostile foreigners make
acquiring technology a good tradeoff.
From the leaders' point of view, if their biologists can clone
artificial organs to keep the leaders alive an extra decade or so, it
will have been a great trade
off.

Here in the United States, we've spent the last century in the
throes of a somewhat similar educational culture
war. Unfortunately, its results have not been as positive as
Baron Macaulay's: instead, it has resulted in our having a distinctly
inferior education system when compared with international
standards. We'll take a look in the next article in this series.

Charles Napier, the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of Suttee, replied:

‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And we will follow ours’

January 7, 2019 8:31 AM

WO said:

@Michael Greenberg - WOW! That comment is one of the reasons we segue into interesting areas of the arcane past. What a priceless addition to our bon mot collection! Thanks!